‘One Belt,One Road’ and China’s emerging Afghanistan dilemma

This article argues that China’s approach to Afghanistan since the end of the Cold War has been shaped by the desire both for security in Xinjiang and for geopolitical advantage in Central Asia. While Beijing’s Xinjiang calculus was ascendant from 1991 to 2001, since 2001 a broader geopolitical calculus has emerged. This latter factor has been encapsulated in President Xi Jinping’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ strategy, which, at its core, is an outgrowth of Beijing’s decades-long agenda to integrate Xinjiang and utilise this region’s unique geopolitical position to facilitate a China-centric Eurasian geo-economic system. While China’s Xinjiang calculus determines that it shares an interest with the USA in combating radical Islamism in Afghanistan (and Central Asia more broadly), the geopolitical calculus of the ‘One Belt, One Road’ strategy points to a fundamental incompatibility between US and Chinese interests.     

Notes on women in the global city: Chicago

As the organizers of an event on women in the global city, we wanted to create a forum exploring the intersections of class, gender and other forms of inequality that fracture ‘global Chicago’. In the panelists' discussion of the intersections of struggles relating to housing, education and environmental justice in Chicago's particular version of the global city, we found evidence of lives disrupted by neoliberal trends, as well as possible sites to contest these disruptions. These struggles reverberate to shape a new urban vision, as the academics and activists assembled for our panel aim not just to work on the local issues of specific women, but to create a city in which work is well compensated, housing is affordable for everyone, schools educate all children well, all neighborhoods are safe both from crime and environmental pollutants, and everyone has the time to fully engage as active citizens of the city.     

中国政治地理学研究展望

相对于人文地理学的其他几个主要分支学科而言,政治地理学在中国发展缓慢。本文认为这主要不是由于中国缺乏政治地理研究的素材,也不单纯是由于中国缺乏研究政治的环境。从学科的角度看,有四个方面的原因束缚了政治地理学在中国的发展:地理学分析尺度的下移、建设性实证研究的缺乏、相关学科理论支持不足和地理学本身\"远离政治\"的惯性影响。本文在粗略梳理了西方政治地理学发展脉络的基础上,通过对比分析,提出了中国政治地理学发展的三个方向:城市政治地理、地方政治地理和新地缘政治学,期待中国政治地理多尺度、多样化的实证研究尽快展开。     

AGRICULTURAL COOPERATION AND AGRIBUSINESS IN SOVIET TRANSCAUCASIA

The author, an authority on the agriculture of Transcaucasia, traces the evolution of the new Soviet system of interfarm integration at the rayon (minor civil division) level and the development of a new agribusiness administration combining all farm-related and food-related activities. Since the initial experimentation with rayon-level integration (known by the Russian acronym RAPO) in the Georgian SSR in the early 1970s (notably in Abasha Rayon), the RAPO system of administration has been introduced throughout the Soviet Union. As of Jan. 1, 1984, there were 3,109 RAPO administrations in the USSR, comprising 95,975 separate enterprises with a total employment of 33.6 million people. The enterprises included 50,435 farms (mainly the nation's 26,000 collective farms and 23,000 state farms), 7,849 agricultural processing plants, 19,587 agricultural service enterprises and 7,361 rural construction agencies. The RAPO system of administration constitutes the lowest level of a new agribusiness hierarchy of management, represented at the republic and national levels of government by the consolidated Agroprom (Agribusiness) agencies.     

The Limits of Geopolitical Remote Sensing

Two Finnish scholars provide critical commentary on a paper on Finland's identity politics and national identity, published in a 2005 issue of Eurasian Geography and Economics (Antonsich, 2005). In the process, they criticize the practice of "geopolitical remote sensing" more generally, arguing that it is symptomatic of a broader methodological problem in human geography. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: O52, Z13. 17 references.     

Negotiating and queering US hegemony in TV drama: popular geopolitics and cultural studies

This article argues that popular geopolitics should pay closer attention to entertainment television and to the negotiations, complexities, and contradictions associated with contemporary televisual texts. This move requires a closer engagement with media and cultural studies than that initiated to date. In the second half of the article, we discuss the ABC TV drama Commander in Chief, which follows the first female president of the USA, and is set in a post-9/11 world wherein the struggle for US geopolitical domination has become a much more complex endeavor. We end by wondering whether entertainment television might provide us with imaginative resources for queering US hegemony.